… and we don’t care who knows it.

Roberts, the Republic columnist, has been all over an ongoing scandal out of Maricopa County probate court; certain people who have the bad luck to come under the supposed protection of the court have apparently would up with their estates drained of money by what seems to be high legal and care fees.

As you can imagine, what the certain people have in common is sizable chunks of money, or did until they were put under government protection.

The poster child of this has been Marie Long, who had a stroke in 2005. At the time she was worth $1.3 million. Now she’s broke and about to be evicted from her nursing home.

One of Roberts’ several columns on Long is here.

Today, Roberts had details on another probate court case, about a 49-year-old guy, Edward Ravenscroft, whose drug addictions got him in big legal trouble. Now, Ravenscroft is lucky; a lot of folks arrested for possession three times would be in prison. Fortunately for him, he’s a pharmaceuticals heir supposedly worth $5 million.

According to Roberts, felicitous circumstances like this — rich folks coming under the care of the probate court — triggers certain arrangemens:

In January 2009, attorney Paul Theut was named Ravenscroft’s guardian-ad-litem and within a month Theut asked that Sun Valley Group be brought in to oversee the millionaire’s estate. Ravenscroft, he wrote, cannot manage his affairs due to drug and mental-health issues and “has property that will be wasted or dissipated unless proper management is provided.”

So they proceeded to manage it for him.

According to court records, Theut collected $62,000 of Ravenscroft’s money in his first 3½ months as GAL. Larry Scaringelli was appointed his attorney after Commissioner Michael Hintze rejected Ravenscroft’s own choice of a lawyer. (Being the one to foot the bill, Ravenscroft thought he ought to have some say in the matter.) Scaringelli collected nearly $33,000 in his first five months. Sun Valley and the Maricopa County public fiduciary, which is Ravenscroft’s guardian, haven’t disclosed their take.

Neither Scaringelli nor Theut returned calls to explain their bills.

Ravenscroft is now locked out of his own house and is living on a friends couch. He tells Roberts that the charges now exceed a half-million dollars.

Roberts’ blog is one of the better ones in town. Here she is on some recent antics in the state legislature:

Apparently, all the state’s problems have been solved because Senate Appropriations Chairman Russell Pearce, one of the Legislature’s key members, has introduced a bill mandating that the state hang a copy of the Ten Commandments at the entrance to the state Capitol.

This is, of course, fantastic news for tens of thousands of Arizona’s children, who I’m guessing now won’t be summarily tossed out of the state’s health-care plan for the poor. And it must mean that our leaders have found a way to fully fund Child Protective Services so that the little children — the ones we could save if we fully funded the agency — won’t have to suffer.

Variety says the Weinstein brothers have bought the distribution rights at Sundance to The Tillman Story, a documentary on the life, death and aftermath of the former Cardinals quarterback safety:

Distrib’s [sic] snagged North American, U.K., Australia and New Zealand rights on docu “The Tillman Story,” the military death exposé about NFL player Pat Tillman, helmed by Amir Bar-Lev and written by Mark Monroe (“The Cove”). “Tillman” is produced by John Battsek of Passion Pictures.

The Weinstein Company, run by the brothers Bob and Harvey, is the organization the pair formed after leaving Miramax behind at Disney. The story says it will hit theaters later this year.

Says IndieWire:

“What they said happened, didn’t happen,” Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary, says early on in “The Tillman Story,” “They made up a story, so you have to set the record straight.”

Mystery surrounded the passing of Tillman after he was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, sparking a Congressional investigation into the cause of the pro football player’s death. He was awarded the U.S. military’s Silver Star for dying in the line of enemy fire, but facts later revealed that he was killed by friendly fire. The film takes a broader look at Tillman’s life and the often conflicting accounts of his death, including a tug-of-war between the U.S. military and his own family as the facts surrounding the incident are revealed.

Henry Paulson, George Bush’s treasury secretary, has a new book out, describing his role in the government’s attempt to control the financial meltdown last year. The Wall Street Journal today prints an excerpt.

It’s about the day John McCain, Underdog-like, brought his presidential campaign to a halt and returned to Washington to save the day.

McCain himself has said economics isn’t his strong suit; the tale as Paulson tells is correspondingly comedic. He first describes his worry that the abrupt arrival of McCain would unravel the work the administration had done to get both sides to agree on the steps he felt the country needed to make to avert a complete disaster.

It reminds us again that Bush, his advisers and congress were already working to cope with the mess; they didn’t exactly need a political peacock with no economics background to help.

And remember that Paulson is a Republican.

Anyway, here’s his account of what happened at the summit McCain called for:

Obama and the Democrats were skillfully setting up the story line that McCain’s intervention had polarized the situation and that Republicans were walking away from an agreement. It was brilliant political theater that was about to degenerate into farce. Skipping protocol, the president turned to McCain to offer him a chance to respond: “I think it’s fair that I give you the chance to speak next.”

But McCain demurred. “I’ll wait my turn,” he said. It was an incredible moment, in every sense. This was supposed to be McCain’s meeting—he’d called it, not the president, who had simply accommodated the Republican candidate’s wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all — his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting. It was not a strategy, it was a political gambit, and the Democrats had matched it with one of their own.

[…]

Decorum started to evaporate as the meeting broke into multiple side conversations with people talking over each other. […]

Finally, raising his voice over the din, Obama said loudly, “I’d like to hear what Senator McCain has to say, since we haven’t heard from him yet.”

The room went silent and all eyes shifted to McCain, who sat quietly in his chair, holding a single note card. He glanced at it quickly and proceeded to make a few general points. He said that many members had legitimate concerns and that I had begun to head in the right direction on executive pay and oversight. He mentioned that Boehner was trying to move his caucus the best he could and that we ought to give him the space to do that. He added he had confidence the consensus could be reached quickly.

As he spoke, I could see Obama chuckling. McCain’s comments were anticlimactic, to say the least. His return to Washington was impulsive and risky, and I don’t think he had a plan in mind.

… it shows a commitment to go to the mat and suck even more.

The lede story in the business section today, taking up nearly half of the section’s front page, is about how Heinz ketchup is changing the design of the little packets of ketchup you get in restaurants.

The photo here, which was online, can’t do justice to the massive one in the paper, an exciting action shot of ketchup being squeezed onto a hamburger.

Why in the world would a local newspaper with falling circulation run a wire-service story about a company with no local ties on the front cover of its business section?

Facing a likely re-election challenge from J.D. Hayworth, John McCain — bad pilot, bad husband, bad senator, bad presidential candidate, and noted maverick-when-convenient — continues to struggle to regain some of his right-wing bona-fides.

WSJ story today on McCain’s problems here.

He’s already come out opposing the current push to end “don’t ask don’t tell” in the military. John Stewart last night dug up a clip that shows the strenuousness of the contortions the moves are putting McCain through.

Video clip at the end of this post. The clip from four years ago shows McCain deflecting an inquiry about his position on the matter then by saying, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”

Of course, at the historic hearing the other day, the leadership of the military came to the senate to tell them they should consider changing it.

McCain yesterday: “I’m extremely disappointed in your statement…. At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ’don’t ask don’t tell’ policy. I’m happy to say we still have a Congress of the United States that would still have to pass a law to repeal ’don’t ask don’t tell.’”

(By the way, as we move toward the 2010 elections, I think it’s interesting how the Obama administration is deliberately highlighting issues like this. So even though there is evidence of an anti-Democratic momentum in the air, however knuckle-headed it might be, the media spent the last two days talking about historic moves by the Dems to right what most rational people think is a long-overdue wrong — and re-running clips of drawling good old boys opposing it for the usual laughable reasons. It looked to me like evidence the administration was going to be using some of these wedge issues against the right in the coming months.)

The Daily Show:

www.thedailyshow.com

Many parts of the Arizona Republic are competently written and edited. Other times… you feel like a bunch of drunk lemurs are randomly throwing paragraphs together and putting them into the paper.

Today’s story on speed cameras begins:

New DPS chief criticizes speed cameras

The Department of Public Safety’s newly appointed director this week joined a growing chorus of powerful voices speaking out against the state’s photo-enforcement system.

In interviews this week, Robert Halliday said that the system should be restructured if it’s not scrapped.

You could be forgiven for reading that and thinking … Halliday is opposed to speed cameras.

He doesn’t seem to be.

Halliday’s actual quotes are sort of nonsensical at first, but a few grafs down it’s clear he’s trying to tip-toe through the overheated politicization of the cameras. (The yahoo vote in Arizona think it’s their right to barrel down the 51 in their SUVs at whatever speed they want.)

The "restructuring?

To Halliday, who had a 35-year career with DPS before retiring in 2008, restructuring would include reassessing where units are placed and installing some penalty to keep drivers from ignoring photo-enforcement notices when they arrive in the mail.

“This program costs a lot of money to put into place. You have a lot of revenue that is not being captured,” he said.

That doesn’t sound like a guy who is joining a growing chorus against the cameras.

The story then veers into an anti-camera talking point—that Janet Napolitano claimed they would bring in $90 milllion a year. In fact, they bring in $27 million, but it’s still $27 million in free money, right? That’s not an argument against the cameras in any case.

And as Halliday was explaining, the real issue is that the soft-on-crime anti-camera brigade in the legislature drew up the law in a way to make it easy for scofflaws to outmanuever the cameras.

The story today says that only 30 percent of the fines are being paid. Hmmm … what is 30 percent of $90 million?

Finally, the story buries the lede:

A vote could turn out to be photo enforcement’s saving grace, Halliday said, something that came as a surprise to the new DPS director as he made rounds at the Legislature this week. Halliday thought the public had lost confidence in the program, a notion some lawmakers tried to dispel.

“People are telling me that a good portion of the population believes in photo enforcement and wants to have it,” he said. “I’m being told . . . it’s kind of a 50-50 thing.”

That’s an impression you don’t get from the rabid anti-camera coverage.

To complete the story’s clumsy handing of the issue, it ends with Halliday trying to appease the anti-camera nuts:

On his return [from a trip to California], Halliday said, he saw three California troopers between his fishing spot and the Arizona border. Between the Arizona border and the Valley he saw five fixed and mobile photo-enforcement units, and no DPS officers.

“My preference is to have more patrolmen on the ground,” he said. “I would much rather have people stopping and talking to people.”

But that of course is the point: Arizona is out of money and can’t afford more patrolmen. The speed cameras control speeds and generate money for the state. And even if the state had more money, the patrolmen who are out should be spending their time doing more than passing out speeding tickets.

And in any case the entire discussion is moot because the state is in such dire financial straits that in just about any other urisdiction outside of the deep south it would be inthinkable for legislators even to conpemplate removing a 427 million-a-year income stream when they are facing bankruptcy.

The Tucson Weekly is looking for a writer to contribute to its film coverage. They need someone to write a full-length review every other week, and contribute film-capsule reviews as well. “Ideally, the reviewer would be in Tucson, and as for pay, that depends on the experience of the reviewer.” says Editor Jimmy Boegel.

Apply through mailbag@tucsonweekly.com.

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Students at the Cronkite School have formed a Hispanics journalists club, a chapter of the NAHJ. Details on a new blog here.

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Sarah Palin’s coming back to Arizona a couple of times in the next few months. In March to do a fundraiser for John McCain, and then in May for a group called Center for Arizona Policy, which is led by creepy anti-sex crusader Cathi Herrod, who’s obsessed with abortion and gays fucking.

The Espresso Pundit, who is a good barometer of the far right’s wishfulness, if not reality per se, says:

Frankly this takes some of the wind out of McCain’s sails. There are plenty people who want to see Palin but don’t want to write a check to McCain…and a CAP check is deductible. It will be interesting to compare the turnout at the two events.

Neither he nor the PBJ story on Palin answers an obvious question about Palin’s CAP appearance: Whether she’s getting her typical $100,000 speaker’s fee.

… is screening at ASU West on Saturday. Kuchar has been an underground filmmaker for nearly 40 years from his perch at the SF Art Institute; It Came From Kuchar is a profile of the director and his twin brother, a sometime collaborator, by director Jennifer Kroot.

Here’s a bit of Variety’s review of it:

“It Came From Kuchar” gleefully piles on everything anyone could want in a docu on the fabulous Kuchar brothers, whose deliriously campy zero-budget mellers — with titles like “Hold Me While I’m Naked” or “Sins of the Fleshapoids” — enlivened many otherwise somber evenings of ‘60s underground cinema. Critics and aficionados seek to distill the essence of the twins’ work, while clips from the films in question unspool in a fever dream of compelling non sequiturs. Meanwhile, George and Mike Kuchar themselves hold forth unstoppably. A must-see for filmmakers of all persuasions …

(A “meller” is a melodrama in Varietyspeak.)

No Festival Required, the local independent film group, has Kuchar himself on hand after, to screen some of his work and answer questions.

And it’s free!

The “George Kuchar Film Symposium” is on Saturday February 6, 2010, at 5 p.m. in the Kiva Lecture Room of the Sands Building at ASU West.

ASU West is south of Thunderbird and west of 43rd Ave. A campus map is here. The Sands building is in the middle of the campus.

Details from NFR here.

The Republic and the New Times are catching up on the stand Tempe’s Hoodlums record store has taken against Lucky Man Productions, which operates the Marquee rock club. The store, which collected a reasonable $1 for each ticket it sold for Marquee shows, balked when Lucky Man tried to add on an additional $3.

The store’s blistering original statement post here. PHXated’s December story on it here.

The Republic story is here, with a consistent statement from Hoodlum’s co-owner Steve Wiley:

Wiley […] stresses he’s not on an anti-Marquee crusade.

“It’s not a personal thing,” he says. “We’ve had a great relationship with those guys at the Marquee for many years. I’m not against service fees. We charge a one-dollar service fee for carrying the tickets at our store, and everyone is fine with that. But if the Marquee or whoever needs to charge $28 in order to make ends meet, then I’m a businessperson, I don’t have a problem with that. Just make it $28 dollars. But don’t put $25 on the tickets and the Web site and then expect me to collect an extra $3 for you.”

New Times blog post on the issue by Martin Cizmar is here. Besides being late and misinformed, it’s about a tenth as good as the Republic story, which is a little embarrassing.

PHXated’s previous posts on the outlandish ticket fees charged by the Marquee are here.

The Republic analyzes:

“Giffords will have to use all of her considerable campaign-trail talents to defend her votes for the stimulus package and the health-care and energy bills in a district that has a track record supporting ‘middle of the road’ candidates,” wrote analyst David Wasserman for the “Cook Political Report.”
Giffords, whose 8th Congressional District encompasses parts of Tucson and communities in Arizona’s southeastern corner, voted with the president 90 percent of the time last year, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan publication Congressional Quarterly.
Although Democratic Reps. Harry Mitchell and Ann Kirkpatrick also are considered vulnerable, they are less closely identified with Obama at a time when his priorities have been losing support in public-opinion polls and at the ballot box.

The paper notes at the end of the story that she has $1.6 million on hand.

The PBJ:

The Republican National Committee said Monday that its short list for the 2012 convention includes Phoenix, Tampa and Salt Lake City.
Phoenix-area political and tourism leaders have been trying to attract either the GOP or Democratic national conventions downtown that summer. They are promoting the Metro light rail system as well as the region’s hotels and resorts and downtown venues including US Airways Center and the Phoenix Convention Center. Arizona is the home state of U.S. Sen. John McCain, who lost his 2008 presidential bid but won the state.

The potential fits in well with PHXated’s contention that the Democrats view Arizona as a key swing state in 2010. McCain did win the state in 2008, but with but 54 percent of the vote, a somewhat anemic showing for a favorite son and a moderate.

Critical Mass Phoenix from Downtown Devil on Vimeo.

A front-page story in the Republic today takes one paragraph from a depressing account of the state’s jobs prospects from yesterday and turns it into an even-more-depressing account.

A very long piece in yesterday’s Republic detailed why Arizona’s economy is so anemic. A long part of the article explored how North Carolina built its Durham-Raleigh-Chapel Hill research triangle:

Once nothing more than an idea envisioned for empty acreage in one of the poorest areas of the Southeast, the “science park” is now an economic-development engine. It has churned out innovations such as Astroturf, bar-code technology and 3-D ultrasounds and employs tens of thousands of workers.
This month the park turns 51.

In other words, that state began to lay a foundation for its future a half-decade ago. Arizona?

A current flash point is the state Department of Commerce. The department’s mission is to recruit businesses and jobs and to link the state, businesses and the economic-development community around the state.
But experts who work with the department say it has not had strong legislative support, is understaffed, is too political and lacks sufficient business advisers. It has had seven directors in the past decade. Its current budget is about $1.86 million. By comparison, the current budget of North Carolina’s Department of Commerce is $45 million.

The story today goes into more depth on the collapse of the department. Quote from a Yuma development director:

“That’s why the state has only done well in economic growth periods,” she said. “We don’t attract industries that have that base, longevity, long-stay. You can’t build an economy on construction, and that’s pretty much what our legislators backed us into because there’s never been any support for economic development.”

Full schedule here, as a PDF.

The closing night films haven’t been released yet, but should be early this week.

The festival boasts some 150 screenings over seven days in eight screening rooms, most of them at the Sedona Harkins. It runs from Feb. 21 to Feb. 28.

Here’s some other tidbits from the fest:

• Appearances by Oscar-winning documentary director Michael Moore and screening of three of his films;
• Turner Classic Movies’ host Robert Osborne returns with three classic films: “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland; “A Place in the Sun” (1951) with Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters; and “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945) with Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde and Vincent Price.
• Aiden Quinn’s “A Shine of Rainbows” as the opening-night film.
• New films by Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan (“The Greatest”) and Barry Levinson (“PolliWood”).
• “Another Harvest Moon,” featuring an all-star cast of Ernest Borgnine, Richard Schiff, Piper Laurie, Doris Roberts, Cybill Shepherd and Anne Meara.
• “Waking Sleeping Beauty,” a documentary about the inner workings and conflicts at Disney during the Michael Eisner years with an appearance in Sedona by director/producer Don Hahn.

While the fest says The Greatest is “by” Brosnan and Saradon, they just appear in it. The film is a reputed heart-tugger about the death of the couple’s son; it played at Sundance last year but apparently hasn’t yet had an American release. The Levinson film, which is called PoliWood, not Polliwood, is a documentary about celebs and the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Phoenix Pride web site has a rough schedule up for events leading up to the Pride Fest, which is the weekend of April 17 and 18.

More details here.

Here’s the ten-day overview; details as they are announced:

10 Days of Pride
Celebrate 10 Days of Pride

Saturday, February 6, 2010
Mister and Miss Phoenix Gay Pride Pageant

Friday, April 9th, 2010
Aunt Rita’s Foundation SAVORlife Soiree

Saturday, April 10th, 2010
Phoenix Film Festival – LGBT Day

Saturday, April 10th, 2010
SWAY Street Beat Party

Sunday, April 11th, 2010
1N10 Rebel Yell Music Festival

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
Arizona Pride Guide’s Mix & Meet

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010
Pride Around Town

Thursday, April 15th, 2010
ECHO Magazine Reader’s Choice Awards

Friday, April 16th, 2010
GPGLCC’s An Evening of Pride

Saturday, April 17th, 2010
Phoenix Pride Parade
Phoenix Pride Festival

Sunday, April 18th, 2010
Phoenix Pride & AZ Frontrunners 5K Run and
3K Walk
Phoenix Pride Festival